How a Little Known Chiropractor Turned His Business Into A Lead Generating Money Machine

I had a client who was a chiropractor. He called me and asked me to take on his marketing program, with the goal of doubling his business. Like most chiropractors, he was trying to be everything to everyone. He treated back pain, neck pain, headaches, asthma, fibromyalgia, sciatica and so on.

His current marketing program consisted of flyers he had inserted into his local newspaper, and he was paying around $2k per month for that service. The flyers were delivered to approximately 32000 people each month. He then told me that he was averaging just one new patient per month from those flyers.

When I asked him WHY he was using newspaper flyers, his response was the same response I hear from 99% of all small business owners… “that’s what my competition is using.” I asked him if he had a passion for any one specific condition that he treated.

He said he had a real passion for helping fibromyalgia sufferers, since fibromyalgia is such a horrible, painful disease that no one knows what causes it and there is no known cure for it… although several chiropractors are having tremendous success in completely relieving the pain associated with this disease through a carefully restricted and monitored diet.

I recommended that he use his passion and create a niche market… meaning that instead of treating all the various painful conditions like he was currently doing… he would specialize in fibromyalgia and use just that one condition as the primary focus for his marketing. He can still treat the other conditions, but his core message will always focus on fibromyalgia.

Knowing he was going to be repositioning himself and his business as a fibromyalgia specialist got him very excited since he would now be servicing clients he was deeply passionate about. I could actually tell he was regaining his own personal passion for being a chiropractor. So here’s what we did. We had to create his sales process based on his newly selected niche market.

Remember earlier I said there were three components to the sales process… lead generation, lead qualification and lead conversion? And we ALWAYS start with the end in mind… which is lead conversion. Lead conversion is where the actual sale takes place… where they agree to accept treatment for their condition and pay their initial fee.

There are seven possible places where that may happen. Those are the seven distribution channels. In looking over all seven of them, the doctor and I agreed that only one needed to be considered. In the case of fibromyalgia sufferers, they would never agree to treatment until they were sitting in front of the doctor and listening to him explain how he could treat such a terrible condition. They needed to speak directly with the expert and be convinced that the doctor did indeed have the expertise and training to really help them.

That agreement would only come through a direct sales distribution channel. It would NEVER come from going online and visiting a website. It wouldn’t come from a retail outlet or mail order. They would never agree to treatment from speaking with a sales agent… from receiving a phone call or from attending an event. ONLY a face-to-face meeting is going to convince a fibromyalgia sufferer to accept treatment.

So now we had the proper distribution channel selected… direct sales. That now becomes the goal of the entire sales process… we must get the prospect face-to-face with the doc.

So now we go to the remaining two sales process components we discussed earlier… the two that ALWAYS go together… lead generation and lead qualification.

We have to create an emotionally compelling message that generates fibromyalgia leads… in other words, gets qualified fibromyalgia sufferers to raise their hand and indicate they want treatment. Well… we can’t very well create an emotionally compelling message until we fully know and understand who it is specifically that we’re trying to attract… as well as what it is they want in their decision making process. In other words, now we have to create an ideal client profile and understand their decision making process.

So together, the doctor and I created his ideal client profile, and began by identifying his ideal client’s demographic profile. Turns out that over 90% of fibromyalgia sufferers are women… between the ages of 18 and 65, unemployed and disabled due to their extreme pain.

We then created his ideal clients psychographic profile, which centered on the fact that every patient coming to a chiropractor is looking for pain relief. You don’t go to a chiropractor for any other reason, plain and simple.

And once we broke pain down into all of the various conditions that involve pain… such as back pain, neck pain, sciatica, fibromyalgia and so on… that’s when the doctor selected fibromyalgia as the one condition he was most passionate about.

By the way, this highlights the advantage of performing a complete ideal client profile. You come out of that exercise knowing the demographics, psychographics and niche market that meets the passion of both the business owner AND the ideal client. Now we had to map out the doctor’s ideal client’s decision making process.

As we started to map this out, I asked the doctor what he thought the hot buttons were for fibromyalgia sufferers. He said they only have one… PAIN RELIEF! They want to get rid of the pain. That sounded logical to me as well, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it doesn’t matter what the doctor or I happen to THINK their hot buttons are. It’s what our ideal client’s really WANT that matters.

I asked the doctor to contact several of his current fibromyalgia patients, and ask them this question. If they could wave a magic wand that would produce whatever they wanted from a doctor specializing in fibrodmyalgia, what would it be? The answer we received shocked us both. It turned out it wasn’t pain relief that was their most pressing concern. Their hot button… almost unanimously… was the diagnosis of the disease itself.

The women explained it this way. The women were told by their physicians that fibromyalgia is a horrible disease with no known cause or cure. So the women had resigned themselves that they were going to have to learn to live with a certain amount of pain. However, when they first felt this pain, they usually went to their family physician. For whatever reason, in today’s medical community, if a doctor doesn’t really know what’s causing pain in a patient, they almost automatically diagnose it as fibromyalgia.

It’s practically become the diagnosis of choice when a doctor can’t figure out what’s wrong. Somehow, these women were subconsciously picking up cues from their doctors that the doctor really wasn’t sure if they actually had fibromyalgia or not. So after they left the doctor’s office, they would go back home, jump online and Google fibromyalgia. That’s where they discovered that fibromyalgia is the most widely misdiagnosed disease in the medical community.

That turned out to be their hot button. It wasn’t the pain that was most important to them. Oh sure, they wanted the pain gone, but they were told that pain was a major symptom of this disease, and that they would have no choice but to “learn to live with it.” However, the women began thinking that if they really didn’t have Fibromyalgia, but in reality had something else that was wrong with them, then there was hope they could be cured.

So their major hot button was the diagnosis of the disease itself. These women simply wanted to know for sure that they really had fibromyalgia, because if they didn’t, then there was probably a treatment for what they really did have… and they wouldn’t have to spend their entire life battling the pain.

So now that we knew their decision making process involved the diagnosis, I asked the doctor if he was able to perform such a diagnosis. He said he wasn’t, but that a fellow colleague of his was VERY good at it. I told him he needed to innovate his practice and somehow master that diagnostic procedure. That skill would allow me to create compelling marketing that would position this doctor as a fibromyalgia specialist. He would become his community’s resident expert.

So in essence he had to innovate his own personal skill level so he could provide that diagnosis… and do so with a specific percentage of success. Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering what made us think of this brilliant idea, this is all a part of the Decision Making Process we teach to our clients. It’s a proprietary tool we use to get our members thinking in terms of competition-dominating innovative practices.

The colleague this doctor knew had developed a very successful type of diagnostic process for fibromyalgia sufferers… and he had documented proof that his diagnosis had a 93% success rate in accurately diagnosing the disease. So our chiropractor spent an entire week with this doctor learning the procedures… and was able to completely master the techniques.

Now we were ready to create his marketing message. You’re also about to witness first hand the real power of knowing and understanding the sales process. Do you remember earlier we said you always begin with the end in mind? And that means you must first select your channels of distribution. For this chiropractor, he only had one… direct sales.

Now we need to start thinking about lead generation and lead qualification… those two other components that should always work together. We need to know the strategies that will drive qualified prospects into this doctor’s office for a face-to-face meeting. That’s the ONLY place the sale will be completed.

Unfortunately, out of the twenty marketing strategies, sixteen were viable strategies for chiropractors… SIXTEEN! I looked them over carefully and quickly assessed the cost to implement them… the probability of success for each one and the available resources the doctor had to work with.

After careful consideration, I recommended to the doctor that he switch his marketing from those horrendous and worthless newspaper flyers… to cable TV. Since cable is controlled by local zones, he could market to only those prospects within his local area, since most patients aren’t going to drive more than 5 miles or so to see a doctor. Another important consideration… the cable rates in Milwaukee were very inexpensive.

I felt that cable TV would allow him to pinpoint his ideal clients, and instead of spraying and praying with his marketing… and trying to hit anyone and everyone that was in pain, he could laser-focus his marketing to reach all the fibromyalgia sufferers within his local community.

Unfortunately for me, he was dead set against the idea of using cable TV. It turned out that he had been burned before with cable TV. He had used cable on 3 previous occasions, spent more than $10k in production fees to produce his commercial, and when he ran this expensive ad, his phone never rang once.

Once I saw his commercial, I understood why. His commercial had nothing to do with his clients… it was all about him. The commercial featured him standing in his office. Woooo, that’s compelling stuff. It featured his office staff filing papers and speaking on the phone. Ohhh, be still my beating heart. At the end of the ad, it showed him bending a patient like a pretzel in his treatment room. Geez, even I was wincing on that one.

He never once mentioned the benefits the patient would receive or experience. But here’s the good news. 99% of all marketing and advertising does this exact same thing… and that opens the door for any small business owner who truly understands the proper way to create competition-crushing marketing to walk through that door and literally dominate their market.

Most of the marketing and advertising I see every day is loaded with nothing but features about the businesses product or service, and NEVER mentions any of the benefits that product or service provides to the clients. So our chiropractor was dead set against cable TV since his phone never rang after he invested all that money. I told him that if he would trust me, I would make his phone ring… A LOT!

He begrudgingly agreed to let me run a 4 day marketing program as a test. And since he honestly thought that none of this would actually work, he would only authorize a budget for $1300.

OK… now that I had his approval, I knew that in order for this ad to generate results, we had to deliver the right message to the ideal client… one that would emotionally compel them to respond and eventually come in for a face-to-face meeting with the doctor.

I went back and analyzed the ideal client profile and their decision making process. Remember, these women are in so much pain they’re disabled and unable to work outside of the home.

In fact, most of them were forced to spend much of their time lying on the couch throughout the day to help offset the pain. So let’s put ourselves in their shoes. If you were lying on the couch during the day, what would you be doing? I’d be willing to bet that the TV would be on. Do you see why I felt this type of ideal client is absolutely perfect for cable TV advertising?

Now we had the key ingredients for a successful ad. We knew the specific audience… we knew what they specifically wanted… and we had the specific solution to their problem. I created an ad that consisted of a single, still picture of a young lady holding her head in a painful pose. That picture cost me $3 at IPhoto.com.

That was the total expense to produce this ad. No $10k production cost was necessary. At the top of the ad it said Attention Fibromyalgia Sufferers so it would pre-qualify our ideal client… and I added a toll free number at the bottom that prospects could call to receive either a free informational report… or request an actual appointment with the doctor. I then created a 30 second voice-over that sounded like this.

“Attention fibromyalgia sufferers, have you been told by your doctor that you have fibromyalgia? Would you like to know for sure? Fibromyalgia is the single, most misdiagnosed condition in the medical community today.

We have created a pain free diagnostic assessment that has a better than 93% success rate in accurately diagnosing fibromyalgia, and an effective treatment program that will finally relieve your pain once and for all. Imagine getting back your active life, and enjoying pain free activities again. You owe it to yourself to reclaim your health… and your life. To obtain a free report and learn more about this revolutionary process, or to request a free diagnostic health assessment, call the toll free number below.”

Well, what do you think? If you were lying on your couch suffering in pain, disabled and absolutely miserable, would you be emotionally compelled to call for that free report… or come in immediately for your free assessment? Naturally, the success of this ad can only be measured one way… RESULTS! Did this ad actually get any results. Remember, all we did was follow the LPW process step-by-step to create all of this. There was no guesswork… no hoping and praying… no crossed fingers. We simply followed a proven and tested process.

Also remember that we were only able to run this ad for 4 days… Thursday through Sunday. Well… by Monday morning, the doctor had 137 leads waiting… 94 of them wanting that free report… and the other 43 wanted to be contacted for their free assessment.

But listen to this. This chiropractor was so certain this ad would never work, he never had me train his receptionist on the proper way to follow up with the leads he generated so she could properly close them into sales. Her closing technique consisted of her calling each prospect and saying something like “Want to come in and see the doctor?”

Well, as bad as that was, this doctor still converted 37 new patients out of the 137 leads. Each patient was worth an average of $2500. That meant that this doctor made more than $90,000 in revenue… all for a $1300 investment. And by the way, ALL marketing is exactly that… an investment. You should NEVER think of it as a cost.

I guess the problem is that for most small business owners, it actually IS a cost… since they never receive any type of return on their investment. When you spray and pray, you will never make money with marketing. You MUST have a tested and proven process to guide your marketing efforts, and that process MUST start by developing an accurate sales process for your specific business.

But here’s the real benefit for doing this, and I want all of you to pay very close attention to what I’m about to say. Everything I just covered are the components that make up a powerful sales process. The ideal client profile, the decision making process, a compelling message, properly placed marketing with the right message aimed at the ideal prospect, the distribution channels, the strategies and tactics. All of that makes up what we call the “sales process.”

But here’s why this is SO important for you to know… and how it can powerfully impact your business. When you know your ideal client profile… you now know who to market to… and where to market… in order to reach your ideal client.

And when you know what to say to them because you understand their decision making process… and how to market to them because you have innovated your business so that your competition can’t hold a candle to you… you can now create an emotionally compelling message that practically forces them to buy what you sell. And do you realize that when that happens, you no longer have a business? You now have a “money machine.”

What do I mean by money machine? Let’s go back to the chiropractor. He now knows his ideal client… both demographically and psychographically… which means he knows their hot buttons. He knows their decision making process, and based on that… he innovated his practice to give them what they want… an accurate diagnosis.

By doing this, he’s no longer just a chiropractor. He’s positioned himself as the local fibromyalgia specialist. He’s the expert, and every prospect WANTS to do business with the expert. And thanks to knowing his entire sales process from start to finish, he now has a proven and tested ad that emotionally compels his ideal prospects to either request a report or come in for an assessment. Either way, he has qualified prospects that have identified themselves as potential patients.

He also knows exactly where to run his ad, for how long, on what stations and at what times. He knows the ad will cost him $1300… generate 137 leads on average… and he will convert 37 of those leads into patients worth an average of $2500. Now… for every marketing investment of $1300 he makes, he will net a return of more than $90k.

He can now run that ad whenever he wants… as often as he wants. And the results will average out about the same every time. I don’t know about you ladies and gentlemen, but I call that a money machine. How would you like to turn your business into a money machine as well?

Well guess what? Now you know exactly HOW to do it. I have just unveiled to you the exact process I use to help our clients around the world create competition crushing marketing and build a market dominating business.

You now have three choices. First, you can do all of this yourself. Your second option is you can find someone to help you do all of this. Your third option is to hire someone to do this all for you.

The option you choose doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you do one of them. Action = Results! Take action and see these same results in your business.